Nothing ever happens

Nothing ever happens is the title of the great Del Amitri song. The sentiment doesn’t quite fit my life just now. Having watched the final episodes of The Wire a couple of days ago, we got the train to Liverpool to visit our son, daughter-in-law and 8 week old baby, Ben. Back on Saturday night ready for an inspiring and full Sunday. (The photo is from the amazing St John, Upper Norwood, as the sun shines through.) Then off to Ireland to speak at a conference from Monday to Thursday.

On Saturday night BBC4 showed some great singer-songwriters from the last thirty years of BBC sessions. It was excellent. And it was followed by the first of a new short series of Songwriters Circle which brings together three singer-songwriters before a live audience for an intimate gig. A similar series ran for five sessions on BBC2 in July 1999 and it was just brilliant.

The orginal series began with Neil Finn (Crowded House), Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera) and Graham Gouldman (10cc). They each sang one of their own songs before joining in on each others’ songs in front of a small live audience. Later editions (five in total) involved such greats as Chrissie Hynde, Nick Cave, John Cale, Joan Baez and Paul Heaton.

The new series that began last night brought together Justin Currie (Del Amitri), Chris Difford (Squeeze) and Boo Hewerdine (The Bible). The weakness of the format is that the singers get to talk too much, but the singing of some classic songs was powerful – one Justin Currie song even bringing Chris Difford to tears because of its association with a time of a traumatic relationship break-up.

That’s the power of music and poetry. Difford writes some great narrative songs about otherwise ordinary things (like Up the Junction, Cars, etc.) – Currie sings withsuch a passion and intensity that (like I find with Neil Finn’s voice) you don’t want him to stop. The Beautiful South perfected the genre, but these guys will do.

And that’s the thing about songs. They give expression to common emotions and experiences, but with a language that shines a unique light on them. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but only after an excursion through The Wire – an extraordinary television drama that uncovers the complex problems of post-industrial America through the experiences of politicians, schools, media, unions and drug criminals in Baltimore. It’s no wonder it has become a cult classic.

What is extraordinary about The Wire (apart from the astonishing ubiquity and flexibility of the F word) is the way it refuses to play the game of normal TV drama. Characters are introduced full of potential for development, but go nowhere. Others seem destined for particular prominence, but then get randomly killed (Stringer Bell early on and Omar towards the end). You constantly get the impression that the writers are not going to indulge our tidy narrative minds that expect loose ends to be satisfactorily tied up in an orderly fashion before the end.

Life, says The Wire, is just not like normal TV drama. People (Omar, for example) control events with singleminded determination and brute force of personality – only then to get shot (while buying groceries in a shop) by a kid who doesn’t appear again. Life is messy, random, full of coincidences and choices with consequences. Much of what happens to us has little to do with getting formulae right or deserving particular outcomes: it just sort of happens. (Terry Eagleton touches on this in his book On Evil.)

We like to think that our lives are central to the world – that what happens to ‘me’ matters to the world. But, like when you are in a funeral cortege for someone you love – whose death has stopped your world – and people outside just carry on with their lives regardless of your grief, the world moves on without even noticing. Your world has changed, but the world hasn’t. It’s the indifference that hurts.

Yet, this is where the question of human meaning is most acutely posed. Who are we and why do we matter? Or, as God, searching for Adam and Eve in the Garden, asks: ‘Adam, where are you?’ The answer for us all, faced with moments of awareness of the seeming indifference of the universe, is simply that we matter because we are made in God’s image and are, therefore, infinitely valuable, infinitely loved. “I am because I am” might suit some people, but it doesn’t do the business for most human beings.

Del Amitri could have sung “Something always happens”, but it wouldn’t have worked so well. Something is always happening, but not everything seems to be replete with significance. And the real offence, caught in The Wire, is that we are not really ever in control of events: it is simply a conceit to think that we are.

Which brings me back to the ordinariness of most people’s everyday life, lived hopefully and yet conscious of the moments of emptiness, loneliness or fear. Justin Currie sang of this as follows:

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before

And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

Bill hoardings advertise products that nobody needs
While angry from Manchester writes to complain about
All the repeats on T.V.
And computer terminals report some gains
On the values of copper and tin
While American businessmen snap up Van Goghs
For the price of a hospital wing

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
They’ll burn down the synagogues at six o’clock
And we’ll all go along like before

And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

It doesn’t have to be that way. But, for a lot of people, it is. And the song captures it better than anything else.

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12 Responses to “Nothing ever happens”

This post reminds me of the time my father died. I came out of the hospital after saying goodbye to his dead body and went out into the hospital grounds. It was a gorgeous sunny day and when I looked up into the sky with teary eyes, I saw a plane streaking across the sky line taking people to holiday destinations – How dare they not know the significance of my tragedy!

Thanks for this article, its very interesting to see you set Justin Currie’s music against peoples everyday life. He is one of the most cruelly underrated/underplayed artists of the last 20 years. He crafts such beautiful intelligent lyrics that expose the rawest emotions within us. I recommend anybody get hold of his latest album “the great war” and take a listen and wallow in the resonance as he speaks to you directly. (PS the song that brought Chris Difford to tears was “if I ever loved you” this was from Currie’s previous solo album “What is love for?”. When I watch the disposable rubbish on xfactor and the pop moguls setting their own agenda as they manipulate starstruck formulaic teenagers without real life experience it drives me crazy that some of the people mentioned in this blog like Currie (Del Amitri) or Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera)hardly get any airplay. The programme was such a treat….. An antidote to mediocrity!!!

At harvest yesterday I sang a song which I came across by chance on the internet.

It is a beautiful song by singer/ songwriter Cheryl Wheeler “When fall comes to New England” and though it does not overtly say so “There’s a lot of God in it”. I found her by chance – so “chance” can sometimes be very good!

See if you can trace it from here where it has been set to some brilliant pictures of the New England fall.

While “nothing is happening” in the human world, in nature a lot of wonderful stuff is there to see for those who take time out to look

Thanks for another great blog. I had not heard of Del Amitri. I will get some of his music.

The video reminded me very much of Paul Simon’s ‘Sounds of Silence’….

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of silence

I too love The Beautiful South and the lyrics of Paul Heaton. This is not central to the argument, but I cannot resist digging you in the ribs, DH is atheist (as you probably knew)

I want my love, my joy, my laugh, my smile, my needs
Not in the star signs
Or the palm that she reads
I want my sun-drenched, wind-swept Ingrid Bergman kiss
Not in the next life
I want it in this
I want it in this

However, leaving aside these minor issues, your central question is most important.

Who are we and why do we matter? Or, as God, searching for Adam and Eve in the Garden, asks: ‘Adam, where are you?’ The answer for us all, faced with moments of awareness of the seeming indifference of the universe, is simply that we matter because we are made in God’s image and are, therefore, infinitely valuable, infinitely loved. “I am because I am” might suit some people, but it doesn’t do the business for most human beings.

Leaving aside the Old Testament stuff (do any serious theists still believe in Adam & Eve, made in God’s image etc.?) we are left with the very sensible and philosophical question of the ‘seeming indifference of the universe’.

I do not have a simple answer to this question, nobody does, (not even Dawkins or Hawkins) but I do not see how inventing a supernatural being helps.

I would suggest that we are not infinitely loved nor valued by a supernatural sky-god. The difference (I think) between me, and a theist, is that I am prepared to say, “I don’t know, not yet.”

Hi Nick – I’m not on the same wavelength as you when it comes to your preferred singers – but what I do like are the words of the songs they sing. Human emotions and situations are so often aptly and concisely expressed in the lyrics.
Anne.

Great blog. I’m also a fan of The Wire, and thought I’d recommend the book “The Corner”, which details the experiences of The Wire’s writers in an inner-city Baltimore neighbourhood in the early 90s. You may have heard of it and/or read it already, but I hadn’t seen it mentioned on your blog so I thought I’d mention it.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . . .

(I would copy the whole thing — any excuse! — but don’t know what the copyright rules are . . . and suspect it’s other people’s favourite anyway)